News

Latest news

From China to Argentina, and covering a huge range of topics, we are delighted to share some recent grants we have made, including:

$31,000 to the Harmony Platform in China to support a small grants programme for community foundation development in China. The Harmony Platform is the initiative of Harmony Foundation, Narada Foundation and Zhenro Foundation.

As a practitioner in philanthropy you know there is a big difference between talking about strategy and living a strategy. One is a plan, hopefully well written and widely vetted, with goals, metrics and tactics. If it is good, a strategy can feel like it is real on paper. However, once a strategy comes into play – especially if it is about systemic change or transformation in a field or a community – the terrain you travel is not the paper’s high hard ground with wayfaring signs, well-trodden paths and signals. Rather, it is what the philosopher and management theorist Don Schön called “the swampy lowlands” where what to do is more uncertain and progress is neither linear nor clear.

Our hometown, Făgăraș, is a community where most of the residents have experienced living in other locations, be it in other cities in Romania or abroad. Most families in our community currently have relatives living in other countries and, over the last 30 years, the population of our town has almost halved. But, in our view, it goes without saying that the diaspora should still play a central role in any attempts to strengthen the local community.

As they are geographically separated by more than 10,000 kilometres, one may wonder how the Fundatia PACTand Community Foundation for the Western Region of Zimbabwe (CFWRZ) came into contact with each other. Given the differences in their contexts, one’s curiosity may be further piqued to learn that over 2018 the two organizations set out to better understand each other’s organizations (aims, models, approaches, etc.) by arranging a two-way learning exchange. Spanning continents, and with funding from the GFCF, two PACT staff travel to Bulawayo in March, and two months later two CFWRZ staff visited southern Romania in May. The GFCF spoke with Maria Ionescu from PACT, one of the exchange participants, to find out more about this seemingly unlikely partnership.